Go back a ways; not a long, long ways, just to the election of Richard Nixon in 1968. However he may not have been a “crook” in 1968, he certainly knew how to tilt the voting board. Google our 37^th president. For those too young, which most everyone is today, his first foray in politics was the congressional contest he won by asserting his opponent, Jerry Voorhis, was in bed with communists. He then chased down Helen Gahagan Douglas, calling her the “pink lady,” down all the way to her skivvies. More dirty tricks forced him to make the famous “Checkers Speech” as Dwight Eisenhower’s vice-presidential running mate. 

 Skip down this lane a little, to Nixon’s 1968 “Southern Strategy.” Outlined by this new master of scurvy-ridden politics, in his own words: “From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don't need any more than that... but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That's where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.”

 

Fast forward a couple steps, to Ronald Reagan. Either recall the name Lee Atwater, or Google it. This below-the-belt, conscience-liberated, wallower in the filthiest slime was the Republican political “consultant” who engineered victories for the GOP. Under his tutelage was Karl Rove. And among the strategies were outright lying about an opponent’s associations and past histories: receiving electroshock therapy, an opponent’s parents were convicted of running numbers, a spouse had burned the American flag.

 

As I learned from reading a survey sent to registered Republicans, push polling became one tried and true method of not only getting the base to cough up campaign donations, energize them to get to the ballot box, but by swaying the vote. An example of a push poll survey: “If you knew that Candidate X supported the attacks on the open expression of the Christian faith, supported teaching the gay lifestyle in our public schools, and was strongly against President Bush’s attempts to protect America in his War on Terror, would you (a.) strongly Candidate X, (b.) moderately oppose Candidate X, (c.) not support the President, (d.) have no opinion?” Note that nothing whatsoever was said that Candidate X was actually suspected of any of the behaviors. The question was “If you knew . . .” And the vile seed had been planted, and the repellent vapors appended to Candidate X’s name.

 

The list of Republican calumnies is long. And in fact they are most distinctively Republican. While the Democratic party and its candidates do not enjoy a wholly blemish-free history, nothing they have done begins to approach the dirty tricks of the GOP. Below is an excerpted article by a GOP operative that only begins to describe the party’s terrible villainy.

 

I was raised under the notion one is who one hangs with. Those who pull the GOP lever, who contribute to and otherwise support the party, cannot escape the noxious taint. The Germans who did not themselves participate directly in the Holocaust but who either supported the National Socialist Party, or who did not oppose it, may as well have manned the hose that piped the Zyklon B into the humanity stuffed chambers.  

 

—   Ed Tubbs  

 January 1, 2008Editorial Observer

A Tale of Political Dirty Tricks Makes the Case for Election Reform

By ADAM COHEN

In New Hampshire’s hotly contested 2002 Senate race, Democratic get-out-the-vote phone banks were jammed with incoming calls on Election Day. The Republican John Sununu, won re-election by under 20,000 votes, and Allen Raymond, a Republican Party operative, went to jail for his role in the jamming.

Mr. Raymond has now written a book about his experiences, “How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative.” In it, he paints a picture of the corruption of modern politics that should leave no doubt about the creativity and cynicism of operatives like Mr. Raymond or the need for tough new election-reform legislation.

Mr. Raymond, whose great-grandfather founded the Underwood Typewriter Company, was a privileged kid drawn to politics at a young age. He moved from small campaigns to larger ones, eventually working for the Republican National Committee and the National Republican Senatorial Committee. It was a world in which, he claims, dirty tricks were the norm.

When Mr. Raymond opened a political telemarketing firm, he was hired by a Republican challenging a New Jersey Democratic congressman. Mr. Raymond’s company — in a plan he says he hatched with the challenger’s advisers — called liberal Democrats and urged them to vote for the Green Party candidate. Those same advisers, he says, gave Mr. Raymond another assignment: to call white households asking them to vote for the Democrat, using the voice of, as he puts it, a “ghetto black guy.” He also called union households, using voices with thick Spanish accents.

No one is suggesting that Mr. Sununu knew anything about the phone jamming. Mr. Raymond says his instructions came from James Tobin, the northeast regional director of the Republican National Committee. And he says a top official of the New Hampshire Republican Party provided the phone numbers of the Democratic get-out-the-vote banks. Mr. Raymond jammed the lines — placing hundreds of hang-up calls an hour — to five Democratic offices across the state and a phone bank run by volunteer firefighters.  

Mr. Raymond pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit phone harassment and was sentenced to five months in prison. Mr. Tobin argued in court that the idea to jam the phones was not his and that he committed no crime. A federal appeals court in Boston reversed his conviction, saying that the law he was found guilty under was not “a close fit for what he did.”

The Republican Party has paid a high-priced law firm in Washington to defend Mr. Tobin, according to The Associated Press, and Mr. Raymond suspects it is because Republican bigwigs “wanted him to keep his yap shut” about the origins of the scheme.

Of course, this tradition of dirty trickery goes back decades. Donald Segretti, an operative with President Richard Nixon’s re-election committee went to jail for distributing devious, and illegal, campaign literature. Today there are many others plying the trade.

In 2006, Democrats in several Congressional districts charged that Republicans unleashed robo-calls — calls that repeated over and over, enraging the recipients — that were made to sound as if they were coming from the Democratic candidate.

Such excesses are often dismissed as the work of a few overeager campaign staff members. Mr. Raymond argues, however, that illegal tactics are often standard operating procedure. “In my business,” he writes, “communications devices were all lethal weapons — and every fight was dirty.”

It is remarkable how little Congress has done to stop all this. A good bill that addresses some of the problems — the Deceptive Practices and Voter Intimidation Prevention Act, sponsored by Barack Obama, Charles Schumer and others — has been limping along, though there is hope it could come to a Senate vote this month. Mr. Raymond is the rare case of a political operative who actually did jail time for dirty tricks. Congress needs to toughen the laws protecting elections, and make clear that anyone interfering with democracy will pay a stiff price.